GRAMMATICAL CLASSES OF WORDS

GRAMMATICAL CLASSES OF WORDS

1. The words of language, depending on various formal and semantic features, are divided into grammatically relevant sets or classes. The traditional grammatical classes of words are called 'parts of speech'. Since the word is distinguished not only by grammatical, but also by semantico-lexemic properties, some scholars refer to parts of speech

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as 'lexico-grammatical' series of words, or as 'lexico-grammatical categories' [Смирницкий, (1), 33; (2), 100].

It should be noted that the term 'part of speech' is purely traditional and conventional, it can't be taken as in any way defining or explanatory. This name was introduced in the grammatical teaching of Ancient Greece, where the concept of the sentence was not yet explicitly identified in distinction to the general idea of speech, and where, consequently, no strict differentiation was drawn between the word as a vocabulary unit and the word as a functional element of the sentence.

In modern linguistics, parts of speech are discriminated on the basis of the three criteria: 'semantic', 'formal', and 'functional'. The semantic criterion presupposes the evaluation of the generalised meaning, which is characteristic of all the subsets of words constituting a given part of speech. This meaning is understood as the 'categorial meaning of the part of speech'. The formal criterion provides for the exposition of the specific inflexional and derivational (word-building) features of all the lexemic subsets of a part of speech. The functional criterion concerns the syntactic role of words in the sentence typical of a part of speech. The said three factors of categorial characterisation of words are conventionally referred to as, respectively, 'meaning', 'form', and 'function'.

2. In accord with the described criteria, words on the upper level of classification are divided into notional and functional, which reflects their division in the earlier grammatical tradition into changeable and unchangeable.

To the notional parts of speech of the English language belong the noun, the adjective, the numeral, the pronoun, the verb, the adverb.

The features of the noun within the identificational triad 'meaning  form  function' are, correspondingly, the following: 1) the categorial meaning of substance ('thingness'); 2) the changeable forms of number and case; the specific suffixal forms of derivation (prefixes in English do not discriminate parts of speech as such); 3) the substantive functions in the sentence (subject, object, substantival predicative); prepositional connections; modification by an adjective.

The features of the adjective: 1) the categorial meaning of property (qualitative and relative); 2) the forms of the

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degrees of comparison (for qualitative adjectives); the specific suffixal forms of derivation; 3) adjectival functions in the sentence (attribute to a noun, adjectival predicative).

The features of the numeral: 1) the categorial meaning of number (cardinal and ordinal); 2) the narrow set of simple numerals; the specific forms of composition for compound numerals; the specific suffixal forms of derivation for ordinal numerals; 3) the functions of numerical attribute and numerical substantive.

The features of the pronoun: 1) the categorial meaning of indication (deixis); 2) the narrow sets of various status with the corresponding formal properties of categorial changeability and word-building; 3) the substantival and adjectival functions for different sets.

The features of the verb: 1) the categorial meaning of process (presented in the two upper series of forms, respectively, as finite process and non-finite process); 2) the forms of the verbal categories of person, number, tense, aspect, voice, mood; the opposition of the finite and non-finite forms; 3) the function of the finite predicate for the finite verb; the mixed verbal  other than verbal functions for the non-finite verb.

The features of the adverb: 1) the categorial meaning of the secondary property, i.e. the property of process or another property; 2) the forms of the degrees of comparison for qualitative adverbs; the specific suffixal forms of derivation; 3) the functions of various adverbial modifiers.

We have surveyed the identifying properties of the notional parts of speech that unite the words of complete nominative meaning characterised by self-dependent functions in the sentence.

Contrasted against the notional parts of speech are words of incomplete nominative meaning and non-self-dependent, mediatory functions in the sentence. These are functional parts of speech.

On the principle of 'generalised form' only unchangeable words are traditionally treated under the heading of functional parts of speech. As for their individual forms as such, they are simply presented by the list, since the number of these words is limited, so that they needn't be identified on any general, operational scheme.

To the basic functional series of words in English belong the article, the preposition, the conjunction, the particle, the modal word, the interjection.

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The article expresses the specific limitation of the substantive functions.

The preposition expresses the dependencies and interdependences of substantive referents.

The conjunction expresses connections of phenomena.

The particle unites the functional words of specifying and limiting meaning. To this series, alongside of other specifying words, should be referred verbal postpositions as functional modifiers of verbs, etc.

The modal word, occupying in the sentence a more pronounced or less pronounced detached position, expresses the attitude of the speaker to the reflected situation and its parts. Here belong the functional words of probability (probably, perhaps, etc.), of qualitative evaluation (fortunately, unfortunately, luckily, etc.), and also of affirmation and negation.

The interjection, occupying a detached position in the sentence, is a signal of emotions.

3. Each part of speech after its identification is further subdivided into subseries in accord with various particular semantico-functional and formal features of the constituent words. This subdivision is sometimes called 'subcategorisation' of parts of speech.

Thus, nouns are subcategorised into proper and common, animate and inanimate, countable and uncountable, concrete and abstract, etc. Cf.:

Mary, Robinson, London, the Mississippi, Lake Erie  girl, person, city, river, lake;

man, scholar, leopard, butterfly  earth, field, rose, machine;

coin/coins, floor/floors, kind/kinds  news, growth, water, furniture;

stone, grain, mist, leaf  honesty, love, slavery, darkness.

Verbs are subcategorised into fully predicative and partially predicative, transitive and intransitive, actional and statal, factive and evaluative, etc. Cf.:

walk, sail, prepare, shine, blow  can, may, shall, be, become;

take, put, speak, listen, see, give  live, float, stay, ache, ripen, rain;

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write, play, strike, boil, receive, ride  exist, sleep, rest, thrive, revel, suffer;

roll, tire, begin, ensnare, build, tremble  consider, approve, mind, desire, hate, incline.

Adjectives are subcategorised into qualitative and relative, of constant feature and temporary feature (the latter are referred to as 'statives' and identified by some scholars as a separate part of speech under the heading of 'category of state'), factive and evaluative, etc. Cf.:

long, red, lovely, noble, comfortable  wooden, rural, daily, subterranean, orthographical;

healthy, sickly, joyful, grievous, wry, blazing  well, ill, glad, sorry, awry, ablaze;

tall, heavy, smooth, mental, native  kind, brave, wonderful, wise, stupid.

The adverb, the numeral, the pronoun are also subject to the corresponding subcategorisations.

4. We have drawn a general outline of the division of the lexicon into part of speech classes developed by modern linguists on the lines of traditional morphology.

It is known that the distribution of words between different parts of speech may to a certain extent differ with different authors. This fact gives cause to some linguists for calling in question the rational character of the part of speech classification as a whole, gives them cause for accusing it of being subjective or 'prescientific' in essence. Such nihilistic criticism, however, should be rejected as utterly ungrounded.

Indeed, considering the part of speech classification on its merits, one must clearly realise that what is above all important about it is the fundamental principles of word-class identification, and not occasional enlargements or diminutions of the established groups, or re-distributions of individual words due to re-considerations of their subcategorial features. The very idea of subcategorisation as the obligatory second stage of the undertaken classification testifies to the objective nature of this kind of analysis.

For instance, prepositions and conjunctions can be combined into one united series of 'connectives', since the function of both is just to connect notional components of the sentence. In this case, on the second stage of classification, the enlarged word-class of connectives will be

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subdivided into two main subclasses, namely, prepositional connectives and conjunctional connectives. Likewise, the articles can be included as a subset into the more general set of particles-specifiers. As is known, nouns and adjectives, as well as numerals, are treated in due contexts of description under one common class-term 'names': originally, in the Ancient Greek grammatical teaching they were not differentiated because they had the same forms of morphological change (declension). On the other hand, in various descriptions of English grammar such narrow lexemic sets as the two words yes and no, the pronominal determiners of nouns, even the one anticipating pronoun it are given a separate class-item status  though in no way challenging or distorting the functional character of the treated units.

It should be remembered that modern principles of part of speech identification have been formulated as a result of painstaking research conducted on the vast materials of numerous languages; and it is in Soviet linguistics that the three-criteria characterisation of parts of speech has been developed and applied to practice with the utmost consistency. The three celebrated names are especially notable for the elaboration of these criteria, namely, V. V. Vinogradov in connection with his study of Russian grammar, A. I. Smirnitsky and B. A. Ilyish in connection with their study of English grammar.

5. Alongside of the three-criteria principle of dividing the words into grammatical (lexico-grammatical) classes modern linguistics has developed another, narrower principle of word-class identification based on syntactic featuring of words only.

The fact is, that the three-criteria principle faces a special difficulty in determining the part of speech status of such lexemes as have morphological characteristics of notional words, but are essentially distinguished from notional words by their playing the role of grammatical mediators in phrases and sentences. Here belong, for instance, modal verbs together with their equivalents  suppletive fillers, auxiliary verbs, aspective verbs, intensifying adverbs, determiner pronouns. This difficulty, consisting in the intersection of heterogeneous properties in the established word-classes, can evidently be overcome by recognising only one criterion of the three as decisive.

Worthy of note is that in the original Ancient Greek

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grammatical teaching which put forward the first outline of the part of speech theory, the division of words into grammatical classes was also based on one determining criterion only, namely, on the formal-morphological featuring. It means that any given word under analysis was turned into a classified lexeme on the principle of its relation to grammatical change. In conditions of the primary acquisition of linguistic knowledge, and in connection with the study of a highly inflexional language this characteristic proved quite efficient.

Still, at the present stage of the development of linguistic science, syntactic characterisation of words that has been made possible after the exposition of their fundamental morphological properties, is far more important and universal from the point of view of the general classificational requirements.

This characterisation is more important, because it shows the distribution of words between different sets in accord with their functional destination. The role of morphology by this presentation is not underrated, rather it is further clarified from the point of view of exposing connections between the categorial composition of the word and its sentence-forming relevance.

This characterisation is more universal, because it is not specially destined for the inflexional aspect of language and hence is equally applicable to languages of various morphological types.

On the material of Russian, the principles of syntactic approach to the classification of word stock were outlined in the works of A. M. Peshkovsky. The principles of syntactic (syntactico-distributional) classification of English words were worked out by L. Bloomfield and his followers Z. Harris and especially Ch. Fries.

6. The syntactico-distributional classification of words is based on the study of their combinability by means of substitution testing. The testing results in developing the standard model of four main 'positions' of notional words in the English sentence: those of the noun (N), verb (V), adjective (A), adverb (D). Pronouns are included into the corresponding positional classes as their substitutes. Words standing outside the 'positions' in the sentence are treated as function words of various syntactic values.

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Here is how Ch. Fries presents his scheme of English word-classes [Fries].

For his materials he chooses tape-recorded spontaneous conversations comprising about 250,000 word entries (50 hours of talk). The words isolated from this corpus are tested on the three typical sentences (that are isolated from the records, too), and used as substitution test-frames:

Frame A. The concert was good (always).

Frame B. The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly).

Frame C. The team went there.

The parenthesised positions are optional from the point of view of the structural completion of sentences.

As a result of successive substitution tests on the cited 'frames' the following lists of positional words ('form-words', or 'parts of speech') are established:

Class 1. (A) concert, coffee, taste, container, difference, etc. (B) clerk, husband, supervisor, etc.; tax, food, coffee, etc. (C) team, husband, woman, etc.

Class 2. (A) was, seemed, became, etc. (B) remembered, wanted, saw, suggested, etc. (C) went, came, ran, lived, worked, etc.

Class 3. (A) good, large, necessary, foreign, new, empty, etc.Class 4. (A) there, here, always, then, sometimes, etc.

(B) clearly, sufficiently, especially, repeatedly, soon, etc.

(C) there, back, out, etc.; rapidly, eagerly, confidently, etc. All these words can fill in the positions of the frames

without affecting their general structural meaning (such as 'thing and its quality at a given time'  the first frame; 'actor  action  thing acted upon  characteristic of the action'  the second frame; 'actor  action  direction of the action'  the third frame). Repeated interchanges in the substitutions of the primarily identified positional (i.e. notional) words in different collocations determine their morphological characteristics, i.e. characteristics referring them to various subclasses of the identified lexemic classes.

Functional words (function words) are exposed in the cited process of testing as being unable to fill in the positions of the frames without destroying their structural meaning. These words form limited groups totalling 154 units.

The identified groups of functional words can be distributed among the three main sets. The words of the first set are used as specifiers of notional words. Here belong determiners of nouns, modal verbs serving as specifiers of notional

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verbs, functional modifiers and intensifiers of adjectives and adverbs. The words of the second set play the role of inter-positional elements, determining the relations of notional words to one another. Here belong prepositions and conjunctions. The words of the third set refer to the sentence as a whole. Such are question-words {what, how, etc.), inducement-words (lets, please, etc.), attention-getting words, words of affirmation and negation, sentence introducers (it, there) and some others.

7. Comparing the syntactico-distributional classification of words with the traditional part of speech division of words, one cannot but see the similarity of the general schemes of the two: the opposition of notional and functional words, the four absolutely cardinal classes of notional words (since numerals and pronouns have no positional functions of their own and serve as pro-nounal and pro-adjectival elements), the interpretation of functional words as syntactic mediators and their formal representation by the list.

However, under these unquestionable traits of similarity are distinctly revealed essential features of difference, the proper evaluation of which allows us to make some important generalisations about the structure of the lexemic system of language.

8. One of the major truths as regards the linguistic mechanism arising from the comparison of the two classifications is the explicit and unconditional division of the lexicon into the notional and functional parts. The open character of the notional part of the lexicon and the closed character of the functional part of it (not excluding the intermediary field between the two) receives the strict status of a formal grammatical feature.

The unity of notional lexemes finds its essential demonstration in an inter-class system of derivation that can be presented as a formal four-stage series permeating the lexicon and reflected in regular phrase correlations. Cf.:

a recognising note  a notable recognition  to note recognisingly  to recognise notably; silent disapproval  disapproving silence  to disapprove silently  to silence disapprovingly; etc.

This series can symbolically be designated by the formula St (n.v.a.d.) where St represents the morphemic stem of

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the series, while the small letters in parentheses stand for the derivational features of the notional word-classes (parts of speech). Each stage of the series can in principle be filled in by a number of lexemes of the same stem with possible hierarchical relations between them. The primary presentation of the series, however, may be realised in a four-unit version as follows:

strength  to strengthen  strong  strongly peace  to appease  peaceful  peacefully nation  to nationalise  national  nationally friend  to befriend  friendly  friendly, etc.

This derivational series that unites the notional word-classes can be named the 'lexical paradigm of nomination'. The general order of classes in the series evidently corresponds to the logic of mental perception of reality, by which a person discriminates, first, objects and their actions, then the properties of the former and the latter. Still, as the actual initial form of a particular nomination paradigm within the general paradigmatic scheme of nomination can prove a lexeme of any word-class, we are enabled to speak about the concrete 'derivational perspective' of this or that series, i. e. to identify nomination paradigms with a nounal (N-V), verbal (V→), adjectival (A→), and adverbial (D→) derivational perspectives. Cf.:

N→ power  to empower  powerful  powerfully

V→ to suppose supposition  supposed  supposedly

A→ clear  clarity  to clarify  clearly

D→ out  outing  to out  outer

The nomination paradigm with the identical form of the stem for all the four stages is not represented on the whole of the lexicon; in this sense it is possible to speak of lexemes with a complete paradigm of nomination and lexemes with an incomplete paradigm of nomination. Some words may even stand apart from this paradigm, i.e. be nominatively isolated (here belong, for instance, some simple adverbs).

On the other hand, the universal character of the nomination paradigm is sustained by suppletive completion, both lexemic and phrasemic. Cf.:

an end  to end------- final  finally

good  goodness---- well  to better

evidence  evident  evidently------ to make evident

wise  wisely  wisdom----- to grow wise, etc.

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The role of suppletivity within the framework of the lexical paradigm of nomination (hence, within the lexicon as a whole) is extremely important, indeed. It is this type of suppletivity, i.e. lexemic suppletivity, that serves as an essential factor of the open character of the notional lexicon of language.

9. Functional words re-interpreted by syntactic approach also reveal some important traits that remained undiscovered in earlier descriptions.

The essence of their paradigmatic status in the light of syntactic interpretation consists in the fact that the lists of functional words may be regarded as paradigmatic series themselves  which, in their turn, are grammatical constituents of higher paradigmatic series on the level of phrases and especially sentences.

As a matter of fact, functional words, considered by their role in the structure of the sentence, are proved to be exposers of various syntactic categories, i.e. they render structural meanings referring to phrases and sentences in constructional forms similar to derivational (word-building) and relational (grammatical) morphemes in the composition of separate words. Cf.:

The words were obscure, but she understood the uneasiness that produced them.→ The words were obscure, weren't they? How then could she understand the uneasiness that produced them?→ Or perhaps the words were not too obscure, after all? Or, conversely, she didn't understand the uneasiness that produced them?→ But the words were obscure. How obscure they were! Still she did understand the uneasiness that produced them. Etc.

This role of functional words which are identified not by their morphemic composition, but by their semantico-syntactic features in reference to the embedding constructions, is exposed on a broad linguistic basis within the framework of the theory of paradigmatic syntax (see further).

10. Pronouns considered in the light of the syntactic principles receive a special systemic status that characteristically stamps the general presentation of the structure of the lexicon as a whole.

Pronouns are traditionally recognised on the basis of indicatory (deictic) and substitutional semantic functions.

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The two types of meanings form a unity, in which the deictic semantics is primary. As a matter of fact, indication is the semantic foundation of substitution.

As for the syntactic principle of the word stock division, while recognising their deictic aspect, it lays a special stress on the substitutive features of pronouns. Indeed, it is the substitutional function that immediately isolates all the heterogeneous groups of pronouns into a special set of the lexicon.

The generalising substitutional function of pronouns makes them into syntactic representatives of all the notional classes of words, so that a pronominal positional part of the sentence serves as a categorial projection of the corresponding notional subclass identified as the filler set of the position in question. It should be clearly understood that even personal pronouns of the first and second persons play the cited representative role, which is unambiguously exposed by examples with direct addresses and appositions. Cf.:

I, Little Foot, go away making noises and tramplings. Are you happy, Lil?

Included into the system of pronouns are pronominal adverbs and verb-substitutes, in due accord with their substitutional functions. Besides, notional words of broad meaning are identified as forming an intermediary layer between the pronouns and notional words proper. Broad meaning words adjoin the pronouns by their substitutional function. Cf.:

I wish at her age she'd learn to sit quiet and not do things. Flora's suggestion is making sense. I will therefore briefly set down the circumstances which led to my being connected with the affair. Etc.

As a result of these generalisations, the lexical paradigm of nomination receives a complete substitutive representation. Cf.: one, it, they  do, make, act  such, similar, same  thus, so, there

Symbolically the correlation of the nominal and pronominal paradigmatic schemes is stated as follows:

N  V  A  D  Npro  Vpro  Apro  Dpro.

11. As a result of the undertaken analysis we have obtained a foundation for dividing the whole of the lexicon on the upper level of classification into three unequal parts.

The first part of the lexicon forming an open set includes

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an indefinitely large number of notional words which have a complete nominative function. In accord with the said function, these words can be referred to as 'names': nouns as substance names, verbs as process names, adjectives as primary property names and adverbs as secondary property names. The whole notional set is represented by the four-stage derivational paradigm of nomination.

The second part of the lexicon forming a closed set includes substitutes of names (pro-names). Here belong pronouns, and also broad-meaning notional words which constitute various marginal subsets.

The third part of the lexicon also forming a closed set includes specifiers of names. These are function-categorial words of various servo-status.

Substitutes of names (pro-names) and specifiers of names, while standing with the names in nominative correlation as elements of the lexicon, at the same time serve as connecting links between the names within the lexicon and their actual uses in the sentences of living speech.